The present invention generally relates to design application workflow, and in particular to methods and systems for maintaining a browser in a design application workflow.
Under conventional systems, end-user workstations like Windows PCs provide the users with multiple applications to access, edit and/or modify different types of documents and data formats.
When building or designing an application, application designers define workflows and application logic to describe the possible actions of a user on data models. Current Internet browser technologies do not permit mixing browser-based workflow with local workstation application workflow. Indeed, while browsers are capable of launching other applications to view and/or edit data objects (such as a document or a video clip), this behavior is “fire and forget” meaning that the browser behavior is not dependent on other application behavior. In other words, at any point in time, a user can go back to the browser from an opened application, close the browser or switch to another application (such as a website), making any feedback from the opened application unpredictable. For example, a user can use the Internet Explorer to start the Word application to edit an HTML file. But once the HTML file is opened in the Word application, the user can freely switch back to the Internet Explorer and continue to browse the Web without regard to the current condition of the Word application. This makes it impossible for an application designer to enforce and design application workflow mixing browser and local applications.
Hence, it would be desirable to provide methods and systems that are capable of, amongst other things, mixing browser and local applications in a design application workflow.